9 Fabulous Online Marketing Ideas for Christmas

Everybody is in a festive mood as work winds down during the Christmas season. With the bounty of year-end bonuses plus the long stretch of holidays, your customers could be in the right frame of mind to spend.

Before you start walking in winter wonderland, however, you need to ask yourself this question:

“What am I doing to attract year-end festive shoppers online?”

Here are some campaign ideas which you can consider.

#1 Dress Up Your Social Channels

Tis the season to be jolly. What better way to go “ho ho ho” than to dress up your tired looking social media channel!

Using FREE online tools like the wonderful Canva, Piktochart, and PicMonkey, you can easily add tinsel, snowflakes, Christmas trees, and other festive icons to your social media profiles.

If that’s not enough, you can also visit websites like Unsplash, Freepik, Pexels, and Pikwizard to add FREE high quality photographs, vector files, and icons too.

#2 Reward With e-Gift Cards

Christmas is a great opportunity for you to give your members a pleasant surprise while driving festive sales. This is where online gift cards come in handy.

Depending on your business, you can reward your subscribers with either of the following goodies:

FREE upgrades to their service packages (for B2B businesses)

Great discounts exclusively available to members (these can be used to ramp up enrollment)

FREE e-Gift cards that they can redeem for actual goods (with terms and conditions)

If your customers are high-value, you may even wish to purchase eGift cards and send it to them via email as a surprise. Major online retailers like Amazon, Zalora, and others have such options available.

#3 Offer Holiday Themed Promotions

Everybody loves a sale – especially if it’s tied to a holiday season. Just look at the crazy amount of sales generated for Thanksgiving and Black Friday (the start of the Christmas sales season) in the US alone.

Traditionally, seasonal sales have been linked to retailers trying to offload last season’s merchandise. While this may be a viable strategy for some, it may be a better strategy to use this opportunity to offer creatively bundled packages and offers.

Here are some ideas that you can immediately use:

Provide FREE shipping for the holiday season only

Offer FREE gift wrapping services for your customers

Create bundled gift packages that come with a discount

Offer a limited time deal for your membership programme

Kiehl’s have done this pretty well. Check out the example below where they provide complimentary gift wrap and allowed customers to create their own gifts.

Fairmont Hotel has a nifty promotion for its hotels in the beautiful Banff area in Canada, with its SnowDays promotion as shown below. Such offers are a good way to drive sales in an otherwise freezing wintry destination.

#4 Gamify Gifting with a Social Contest

There are all kinds of online contests which you can run on your website or social media page. They include:

Photo contests

Video contests

Story-writing and captioning contests

“Guess the Difference” contests

Voting contests

Here’s a fun example from Centrepoint Singapore’s Facebook page. Fans are supposed to guess where a lovable gingerbread man character is found at different outlets within the shopping centre itself, and to submit their answers in the comment box.

#7 Spin a Christmas Tale or Two

I love how Cartier weaves its magic through beautiful storytelling ads every year Christmas. This latest edition features its main protagonist (a lovable panther) lighting up a wintry cityscape. Check it out below:

If you’ve got the budget – and the back-story – you may wish to even go the whole hog and produce a dramatic Christmas chronicle.

Here’s the amazing The Tale of Thomas Burberry produced by one of the world’s leading high fashion brand. It has certainly set numerous tongues wagging, even though it took quite a lot of poetic license in chronicling the story of Burberry’s founder.

#8 Create and Curate Customer Stories

There are numerous ways to do so. You can organise a contest (see above), speak to your customer service or frontline staff, or use a social listening tool like Buzzsumo to find customers writing about your brand online.

The best stories are ones where your brand (or your staff) perform heroic tasks for your customers. Like the example below where Virgin Trains literally saved a customer from a sh*tty situation:

Or this other example from LEGO, where a customer service representative helped to save the day for a 7-year old boy who lost his LEGO Ninjago figure while going out shopping. Sad about his loss, the boy wrote a letter to LEGO which went as follows:

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Founder of Cooler Insights, I am a geek marketer with almost 24 years of senior management experience in marketing, public relations and strategic planning. Since becoming an entrepreneur 5 years ago, my team and I have helped 58 companies and over 2,200 trainees in digital marketing, focusing on content, social media and brand storytelling.